Almost 9% of Catalan students between the ages of 10 and 18 say they have wanted to die and 5.9% admit that they have thought about harming themselves, according to a survey carried out last year by the ‘conselleries’ of Education and Health. In recent times, self-harm in adolescents has skyrocketed: up to 45% admit to having cut themselves at some time. Two data that reflect the problem of mental health that is affecting young people and that the pandemic has aggravated. In the Vocational trainingThe situation is more dramatic if possible in ESO. Teachers complain that the student body is “neglected”, in the words of Rodrigo Plaza, responsible for FP in CCOO. “We do not have psychopedagogues”, abounds jesus martinprofessor and head of FP at UGT.
A piece of information: this academic year 22-23 there are 35 counselors for the 400 public vocational training centers What is in Catalonia? Of these, six correspond to Barcelona. The Work School You have the privilege of having one of these professionals. The problem is that she is one person for 3,000 students. The ratio recommended by Unesco is one counselor for every 250 students. It must be taken into account that the counselor, even if he has training as a psychologist or psychopedagogue, has a wide range of functions: from guiding from an educational point of view, to dealing with diagnosed cases, going through caring for families and accompanying students who can have emotional or learning problems. Too many fronts for one person.
There are centers that do not have this figure. It is the case of Technological Institute of Barcelona (ITB), with 700 students. The Barcelona Education Consortiumextraordinarily, has hired a private service to serve vocational training centers that do not have any guidance counselor. The ITB benefits from this service which, in practice, means that once a month they receive a visit from a psychologist. Something that experts consider insufficient. At the ITB, the first and last visit of this professional was this month of November. He has attended four students.
“Neither counselors nor psychologists”
“A more complicated type of student body comes to us than that of the baccalaureate. And we have neither counselors nor educational psychologists,” laments the director of the ITB, Alberto Villa, summarizing the panorama of FP centers. The counseling and psycho-pedagogical care (EAP) teams that attend secondary schools and that have been overwhelmed for four years now have not attended FP centres. “We don’t have any support,” Vila insists. “It is a grievance regarding compulsory education,” says Plaza. “A good part of our students arrive with an emotional charge: they are repeaters of ESO, or they have re-engaged in the educational system, and in certain professional families the typology is more complex,” adds this teacher currently at CCOO. “There is a large population at risk of having mental health problems that is neglected,” he insists.
What do the centers do when they detect a student with an emotional or mental problem? “We call the EAP unofficially and if they can, they advise us. We inform the family and here we are running out of resources,” explains Vila. In urgent cases, such as a student self-harms in the centerThey call the ambulance. At the ITB they did it just a few days ago with a student who harmed herself. They already lived it last year. “I contacted her nurse and she told me to call the ambulance. We did so. They took her away and the next day she was back in class,” she explains. This young woman has a visit with the public health psychologist once every three months. Teachers experience these situations with impotence.
To this is added another casuistry: the transfer of information from ESO to FP is practically non-existent, according to Jesús Martín. Unlike what happens in the compulsory stage, in which the student’s records go from primary to ESO so that the teachers know the student’s profile, this does not exist in FP. Thus, teachers are blind to their students. “It can take months before the teacher detects that there is a problem,” says Martín, who considers that Vocational Training is “the great forgotten” also in the field of mental health.
Classroom experts and support teams
Mental health problems in adolescents do not catch teachers by surprise. “It was seen coming for years, but the pandemic has accelerated it, and every year it gets worse. The situation is very serious,” stresses Vila, who demands that Educació take the initiative to address this epidemic, in collaboration with Salut. How to approach it?
In the opinion of the director of the ITB, the problem cannot be solved by assigning a psychologist to each center. He believes that a good way to influence would be to introduce into the classroom mental health experts as teachers of some other subject. And urges to do it in the middle grades. “It would not be to teach mental health, but rather he would give a subject and with his gaze in the classroom he would help us detect problems, he would contribute his vision to the rest of the teachers and he could accompany those students,” Vila explains. She takes up the case of the student who harms herself. “The teachers do not really know how she is, if she improves, how we can help her. If we had this professional permanently at the center, he could accompany her, he could detect things, know if it worsens… We do not have real elements, beyond our perception, to know how it is and to be able to help it”, he points out.
Plaza demands that all FP centers have multidisciplinary guidance departments with educational psychologists, social educators and even health personnel, prepared to deal with cases of self-harm, suicide attempts or violence. He defends that the distribution of these resources should be based on the complexity and needs of each center.
Inquiries about self-harm
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Irene Alabauof the platform Obertament who works to make mental health problems visible and normalized in schools, highlights that teachers are often at a loss when it comes to caring for their students. “We have more inquiries from teachers. They don’t have the resources to address the problem, they don’t have the knowledge,” says Alabau, who points out that “they still hard to talk of self-harm, of suicides, are still taboo things, about which there are stereotypes. The teachers have not received training for all of this.” One of the topics that teachers consult the most is precisely self-harm. “They say they have never seen so many cases. They don’t know what to do when, for example, they find him in the middle of the class, with the emotional impact that this entails for all the students”.
The FP sector urges the Government to remedy it as soon as possible. “If we act now, in adolescents and young people, perhaps we will be in time to solve their problems for the adult stage. If not, things will not improve. We have to try to act now in the average degrees of FP“, sums up Vila. Martín agrees with him: “The adolescent population is key. If we don’t help them, as adults it will be difficult to redress the situation.”